I like the Internets ... a lot.

November 2007

11/28/2007

During the last few weeks I have started to see some really amazing digital media artifacts coming out of our classrooms here at PSU. Two weeks ago I came across one of the most amazing uses of a student blog I have ever seen. I hate to say it, but I am reluctant to link to it without her permission, but suffice to say she gets how a blog can work better than most of the people I talk to. This post was based around a video project she and her team did in class -- a simple interview of a faculty member edited to be of interest. Here is what made it amazing, she spent time not only posting the finished product, but wrote a reflective narrative about the process she and her team used to create it. Pictures showing the team working together, a map of their storyboards, and even a discussion of the script. Just an amazing illustration of how powerful digital media can be.

If you look at the pieces that add up to that example you can see a value chain emerging. We start by doing a hot team ... this usually helps us decide if a technology would be appropriate for use in the classroom. Funny that we never come up with ideas that match up to the things that actually happen in our classrooms. The hot team can lead to a call for proposals from faculty under the Engagement Project. When we select a proposal, we meet with the faculty to discuss their needs and find ways to support their activities. From there the faculty teach their course and engage the students in all sorts of cool activities that require them to create digital artifacts. On campuses where we have them installed, students typically visit the Digital Commons to work with killer technology, get hands on help, or connect virtually with a DC Consultant. Once they use the physical spaces to create something they publish it online -- with the Blogs at Penn State, the Podcasts at Penn State, or ANGEL. Every step of the process is supported (or has the potential to be supported if need be). I know it is a very simple view of the value chain, but here is how I see it:

I also think of it as a stack ...

Which leads me to the example that inspired me to write this evening ... a faculty member who submitted an Engagement Award proposal for the Fall semester sent us a couple of examples of her students work today. The first is a virtual tour of the 2007 solar decathlon. The second is just as cool, a walking tour of the tree biodiversity at Ridley Creek State Park. All I can say is that it is amazing. She is integrating blogging, podcasting, Digital Commons, Google Maps, digital photography, and so much more into her classes. The amazing thing is that her students are doing work that will blow you away! Looking at the outputs I can't help but feel excited that the opportunities that are being created can support it all. Just some killer stuff!

11/27/2007

I know I am annoying most of my readers, but I need to capture this stuff just the same. I just decided not to go to the WVU - Pitt game in Morgantown this weekend -- maybe it was the lack of a hotel room, or maybe I just know that showing up would somehow destroy their mojo. Either way I will be watching from home in HD and (hopefully) enjoying the last bit of work that needs to be done to get my Mountaineers into the BCS title game. I know it is a long shot, but getting there would be sweet!

11/20/2007

I know the College Football Season isn't even close to being over, but I never thought I would see two respected ESPN analysts have WVU in the BCS title game. Clearly it all has to play out on the field, but just seeing this gets me excited! WVU still has to win out over a very good UConn team and Pitt. Both are in Morgantown, but history is against us -- this is Thanksgiving week at WVU so the crowd will not be nearly as insane as usual and you can always throw the records out when Pitt and WVU tangle in the Backyard Brawl. What a year this has been and could be.

11/18/2007

Last night I wrote about exporting one blog out of the Blogs at Penn State platform and importing into a commercial (or self hosted) blog environment ... clearly it is really easy, but I didn't think of a couple of things. So today I did the same thing with my Spring 2007 Podcasting Update that I had done in the Blogs at Penn State about a year ago. You can see the whole thing here at this space now by using this link. This time I did three things while moving it:

Grabbed all the images it references from my PSU Personal space and uploaded them into my common directory here at this blog. I obviously preserved the names to make it easier. Another thing I do with all my blogs is organize all the media I reference in each post into a common location ... because of this I was able to take the export file and do an easy find and replace with the old path to the new path. Perfect! Now all my posts reference local media files.

Next thing I did was create a new category here at Learning & Innovation that I wanted all these posts to show up in -- I chose PSU Podcasting.

Again using TextWrangler I did a quick find and replace to set the Primary Category to PSU Podcasting. This brought all my posts in under a common category. I didn't do that on my iPhone blog import and it made me go through and update each by hand ... not too bad, because I only had 20 or so posts, but if it would have been a big blog it would have taken me some time.

I could easily create a script to do that here locally, or by working with someone smarter than myself we could come up with a simple little utility to do it all via the web. All told, it took me under 10 minutes to make it all happen. Seamless move!

11/17/2007

Tonight I decided to move one of my blogs from the Blogs at PSU that I have stopped using over here to my main space. The blog I wanted to move is my iPhone blog that I set up during our investigation of the iPhone. There are a couple reasons I wanted to move it -- getting the content in one location and to see how easy it is to leave the Blogs at Penn State.

I have been writing quite a bit about ePortfolio at the University and much of my thinking has centered on the Blogs at PSU as the primary tool for them. One of the questions I get asked a lot is how can students take their content with them when they leave. One of the things we talk about is that since the Blogs at PSU publish static pages into a directory the whole directory could be downloaded and burned to a CD. I haven't tested that and while I think it would work, I am guessing it would take some tweaks to get the paths right for media and for the CSS. That method would also keep someone from updating their portfolio.

There are a number of commercial blog hosting spaces out there -- Wordpress.com and Live Journal are two of them. I wanted to see what would happen if I took my MovableType powered blog and simply chose to export it and import into a WordPress blog. The long story short is that it just worked. In the Blogs at PSU dashboard I was able to select export and it kicked out a downloaded .txt file that had my posts and all the comments in it.

Then in WP I was able to jsut go to the Options > Import screen and browse for the file.

From there all I did was select a user name for the files to be imported under. At that point I could easily edit the posts, add categories to them, or anything. Everything was preserved. I also just tested it out over at the freewordpress.com and it worked perfectly! So we do have an easy to use solution to let people take it with them when it is time to go.

11/09/2007

When we sat down to talk about who we wanted for this year's TLT Symposium Lawrence Lessig was the firsdt name we threw out. We then instantly said it would be incredible, but probably not realistic ... well, guess what? We got him -- for real, here is the official word. For those of you who do not know who Lessig is, he is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is also the author of several books and is world class speaker. I am thrilled! Save the date, the Symposium will be the day after my birthday, March 29, 2008.

11/08/2007

I was pleasantly surprised to see an article about the Digital Commons today at the Penn State Live site. Nice to see it getting a little attention ... we are getting set to do the next five campuses and we are getting really solid feedback from those who already have DC facilities. Our own facility here at University Park is seeing massive usage -- much more now that we've integrated our faculty and student support spaces into the one Digital Commons. Very exciting!

11/07/2007

I upgraded to Leopard -- unfortunately for me I purchased it from the Campus Computer Store one freaking day before my Apple Distinguished Educator (not for resale) came in the mail -- crap! Oh well. I didn't really have much to say about it here on the blog, but it is a very nice upgrade. My MBP upgraded perfectly, but my iMac at home was not as lucky. It required two days of trouble shooting and four (yes, four) installs before I got it working properly. I got what I thought was a Windows only feature -- a blank blue screen. Then after it finally installed, it locked me out of my account, insisting that I was not the administrator of the machine ... Apple Support forums said installing the Keychain update would fix it. There is a slight problem there, you can't install stuff if you aren't an admin. Took me a while, but using the root account I was able to reset the password and all has been fine since.

There was one other little problem ... for some reason (coincidence I am guessing) one of my three external hard drives I use decided to die. It makes a horrible clicking noise and never mounts. Not a big deal, storage is cheap but that is the one drive I used to store all of my documents -- not music and movies, but (in some cases) decades old files. Scared the shit out of me. Good thing I am a backup freak show ... I was able to use my Apple Backup software and recover everything in about an hour. Worked perfectly. This is the third time I have had to do a full on restore of parts of my digital life. If you don't backup, do yourself a favor and go to the store, buy a hard drive, and backup your stuff.

It looks cool, but is it a real disaster recovery tool?

The whole scenario has me thinking and wondering if Apple's fancy new Time Machine is a safe and viable backup strategy? It seems very slick for going back in time and grabbing a deleted file or two, but is it a true disaster recovery system? If it isn't should I have yet another hard drive to do real backups on? I have had terrific success with Apple's Backup software I get with my .Mac account ... what will Time Machine do when my primary hard drive goes down -- you know, the one with Mac OS running on it -- and I have to reinstall the OS to try and restore? Will it work that way?

11/06/2007

The GPhone was supposed to be something else! Google was going to build a mobile that would crush Apple, Microsoft, and others in the mobile OS market ... instead they built an alliance (sounds a lot like their recently announced Open Social project) and promised to provide a mobile OS in an open source model. Doing so does something amazing ... according to Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms, "We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone." Powerful and interesting ... couple it with partnerships with T-Mobile, Sprint, and the world's largest mobile operator, China Mobile and we may have something here. You know their apps will run perfectly on it -- and so will the delivery of mobile, targeted advertisements. The game will get interesting here ... good to see the mobile space finally getting some forward movement.

11/05/2007

Sometime week before last I posted a little screen capture from the Blogs at Penn State admin dashboard showing some basic system stats. I published the screen capture without comment -- I wasn't really sure what the numbers really represented -- what is an "Active Author" for example? Take a look at today's stats below ...

Last week I was lucky enough to give a guest lecture in my good friend, Bart Pursel's, IST 110 class. I used to teach IST 110 nearly every semester while I was at the College of IST. As a matter of fact, I had a big hand in the design of the course -- my team built the first hybrid offering of the course that took full advantage of the web, a problem-based learning approach, and new ways of thinking about how faculty and students should interact. Let's just say I feel very attached to the course and the kinds of students it attracts. This class was no different -- 50 or so very smart students all wanting to talk, engage, and discuss nearly every point I tried to make. Bart is doing a great job with the students ... introducing them to all sorts of technology -- from blogs and wikis to podcasts and virtual worlds. He is taking a week by week approach to ask them to work and interact with different technologies throughout the semester. Each time I said, "do you know about X" they would all say yes. It was nice talking to students who seem to be in the know.

When I got to blogs I was trying to make my point that these tools are really personal content management tools and not just there for random thoughts. I showed a slide that has little thought bubbles that list all sorts of opportunities for using a PSU Blog ... things like ePortfolio, note taking, team work spaces, and more are represented on the slide.

Bart stopped me and asked the class if any of the students had posted since the lessons on activating and using the blogs -- not a single person raised their hands. Not one. Honestly, I wasn't surprised. Either was Bart ... he wrote about it late last weekend and I left a comment there. It has me thinking more about the whole situation and I am wondering how others feel about a couple of fundamental questions.

The first question that hit me over the head is related to something I started to think about recently -- can we honestly expect them to "come over to our stuff" just because we build it? This isn't the same old issue with them showing up with accounts at Blogger, FaceBook, MySpace, and others ... this to me is about giving them a real reason to use our tools. I am continuing to attempt to rebrand the blog and when I have a chance to really talk the concept through with people they do get it. I am just not sure how to make the message clear without having to deliver it ... that one is confusing me. In my opinion the thing that needs to happen is that students must be asked to integrate the technology into their classes in a meaningful way. I saw a great site created with the Blogs at Penn State the other day from a woman who runs the PSU Alumni Magazine ... she used the Blogs as a tool to track her journey through Alaska. It is a wonderful example of how a blog tool allowed someone to create an experience -- in this case it had nothing to do with anything other than the content ... and that published content was born out of the need to share.

The second question I have is related to getting people engaged in this idea of how we drive adoption in the "blogs for ePortfolio" space ... my post last week about it seemed to capture a little mindshare among more than a handful of people and it served as a great basis for a discussion (and the emergence of an opportunity) today during a lunch meeting. The idea that we could get faculty and students really working together to create a plan that helps track intellectual and personal development was little more than a pipe dream for me last week. After today's lunch meeting I think we have at least two opportunities to make this real. The first came from a colleague in the College of Education who has been committed to ePortfolio for much longer than I have been thinking about. She will find a way to make it all go because it all makes sense to her ... I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get others to consider this form of portfolio space. Today's opportunity will be a step towards the larger goal of getting new people interested in how we do this. It won't be a huge project, but both opportunities could prove to be tipping points.

Can we do it with big numbers? I have no idea, but that question brings me back to where all this started ... what's in a number? Does counting ... count? If turning 1000 students out of 45,000 into people who care enough about their development that they are willing to use our stuff to store, manage, and reflect on their stuff are we being successful? And if I look back at my slide pasted up there would 1,000 using it for portfolio, another 1,000 using it for note taking, another 1,000 for sharing videos they've made, another 1,000 using it to manage teamwork, and so on really matter? When that adds up we have something to report. Until then, can it be classified as a bad decision to pursue this opportunity? Not in my book -- by any measure progress is what I am after. And looking at my little system screen capture tells me we have made progress already. If you've read this far, you might as well leave a comment with some thoughts.